Manual or automatic repricing: when a P2P bot pays for itself
Plenty of merchants reprice by hand and do fine. Whether automation is worth it depends on how fast your market moves and how much volume you lose while you are out of position.
When manual works
- Quiet markets. If the price moves a few times a day, you can keep up.
- Few ads. One ad is easy to watch. Five ads in two currencies aren't.
- You are at the screen anyway. If you are handling orders all day, adjusting the price is part of that routine.
When it stops working
- Busy markets. In active pairs the top of the list changes every few minutes. Every time someone beats you, you drop until you notice.
- Nights and weekends. Orders keep coming while you sleep. Without repricing, your ad either sits too high and sells nothing, or too low and sells too cheaply.
- Both sides at once. Keeping a buy ad and a sell ad positioned, with a margin between them, is where mistakes happen by hand.
A rough estimate
Take your average daily volume through an ad and guess how much of it you miss while out of position. If you trade 5,000 USDT a day on a margin of 1%, you earn about 50 a day. If being out of position for part of the day costs a fifth of your orders, that is about 10 a day, or 300 a month.
Now the other side: a bot also stops you from selling below cost when you aren't looking, because it holds your floor. That part is harder to estimate, but one bad hour in a falling market can cost more than a month of missed trades.
The numbers are only rough, but they tell you quickly whether the question is worth taking seriously.
Try it without risk
Run a bot in simulation mode next to your usual routine. It makes every decision but changes nothing. After a few days, compare the prices it would have set with the ones you set, and the times it would have reacted with the times you did.
P2P Trade Bot has a simulation switch in the panel and in Telegram, and each ad has a live preview showing the order book, the ad it would target and the price it would post.